District gives employees $500 bonuses; taxpayer group objects

A northern Wisconsin school district had a budget surplus this year and returned it to employees in the form of $500 Christmas bonuses, a move that has angered a local citizens group that says the money should have been returned to taxpayers.

The Baldwin-Woodville Area School District, located 30 miles east of St. Paul, Minn., distributed $500 checks to the mailboxes of all full- and part-time employees before Christmas this year, School Board President Jeff Campbell said Tuesday.

He said that earlier in 2011, teachers and other employees agreed to a pay freeze, to pay 5.8% of their salary toward their pension, to drop the WEA Trust health insurance plan and switch to a lower-cost carrier, and to pay higher health-insurance deductibles, all in response to Gov. Scott Walker's Act 10 law and cuts to school spending statewide.

Baldwin-Woodville teachers are still under contract until summer of 2012, but the union's members agreed to many of the concessions school employees with expired contracts in other districts were forced to take under Act 10.

Campbell said all those concessions resulted in a year-end budget surplus for the district, and it seemed appropriate to return approximately $100,000 to the employees, of which there are about 200, according to the Baldwin Bulletin.

Campbell said the workers' concessions helped create the surplus in the first place.

He added that the school board didn't vote on the action. But, he said, there wasn't any opposition to the idea when Baldwin-Woodville Superintendent Russell Helland brought it up at a recent meeting.

"When all this (Act 10 action) was happening earlier in the year, there was discussion at the board about how, if we could at the end of the year, we could try to give something back to employees," Campbell said. "We have custodians making between $8 and $12 an hour, and our youngest teachers make in the low $30,000s per year. We couldn't give them a raise, but we could do this."

Members of the conservative-leaning Citizens for Responsible Government St. Croix County disagree.

"Despite a budget surplus, taxpayers will not get a Christmas bonus," said an email a member of the group, Leanne Rice, sent to the Journal Sentinel.

The group believes the action to be so out of line that it has "filed documentation for an Exploratory Committee for Recall of one or several members of the BWSD," according to a news release.

The acronym appears to refer to the Baldwin-Woodville School District, which is not an elected entity. It's likely the group is referring to members of the school board. A call to Rice for clarification was not immediately returned.